Among products of naphtha cracking, fractions having 4 or less carbons are separated and purified and thus utilized in the petrochemical industry, but C5-fractions having 5 carbons are mostly combusted and used as fuel and only a portion thereof is separated and purified by some companies and thus utilized industrially. Thus, a lot of effort has been devoted to manufacturing high value-added chemical products by separating and purifying C5-fractions.
For example, a norbornene monomer may be prepared into a resin using ROMP and then hydrogenation, as represented by Scheme 1 below (Masahiro Yamazaki, Journal of Molecular Catalysis A: Chemical 213 (2004) 81-87). The polymer thus obtained is referred to as a cycloolefin polymer (COP), which is advantageous in terms of high transparency and low birefringence and thus utilized in materials for packaging food and medicines, DVD materials, optical films for displays, etc.

Alternatively, many attempts have been made to produce resins resulting from ROMP and hydrogenation of a bulky cycloolefin compound monomer such as 1,4,5,8-dimethano-1,2,3,4,4a,5,8,8a-octahydronaphtalene (hereinafter, abbreviated to “DMON”) obtained by subjecting norbornene to an additional Diels-Alder reaction with cyclopentadiene (Masahiro Yamazaki, Journal of Molecular Catalysis A: Chemical 213 (2004) 81-87). However, as shown in Scheme 2 below, DMON is prepared via two steps from dicyclopentadiene and its preparation process is not easy and it is undesirably very expensive to the extent that it is unsuitable for use as a polymerizable monomer. Hence, the monetarily beneficial preparation of DMON is currently regarded as important in terms of commercialization of resins based on DMON.

The polymer material of Scheme 2 has been commercialized by Zeon Corp., Japan.
Zeon Corp., Japan, has produced resins by performing, as shown in Scheme 3 below, ROMP of the olefin group of carbons at 5-6 positions of dicyclopentadiene to prepare a linear polymer, which is then hydrogenated (Masahiro Yamazaki, Journal of Molecular Catalysis A: Chemical 213 (2004) 81-87). In this case, it is essential to completely remove the double bonds of the resin using hydrogenation. However, the resulting resin is problematic because the glass transition temperature is not high.
